Stanisław Lem, ‘The Futurological Congress’ (1971)

 

Lem’s Kongres futurologiczny (1971) was published in a (very smart) 1974 English translation by Michael Kandel as The Futurological Congress—I say smart, because Lem’s novel is a satirical comedy that makes extensive use of wordplay and puns, especially where the many medications and hallucinogens manufactured in his future-world are concerned, and Kandel does sterling work in coining English equivalents for these.

The plot is a brisk and funny series of rabbit-hole plunges, conceptually speaking. As the story opens Ijon Tichy is attending the Eighth World Futurological Congress in the immensely tall Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas—the academic gathering so vast that there is no time for the various conferences papers to be read aloud (they are pre-distributed with numbered paragraphs and delivery and discussion involves shouting these numbers aloud). The political situation is volatile and the hotel is bombed during a battle between government forces and protestors, so Tichy and a few others escape into the sewers.

But by this point Tichy has already ingested hallucinogen-spiked water, and his sense of reality is warping. In the sewer he encounters giant rats walking around on their hind legs. He is rescued by the army and flown away in a helicopter, but then gets blown up so badly his brain must be transported into the body of a young and attractive young black woman to keep him alive (her brain is transported into a younger and even more attractive body, whose brain is likewise transported … and so on). Then he discovers he's still in the sewer. Or is he? Unable to distinguish reality from the hallucination, he is told by doctors that he must be put into suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced to the point where it can cure him.

He wakes in 2039, and Tichy goes on a Cook’s tour of his future utopia. Drugs tweaking and improving mental states and perception address all the former dissatisfactions of life. War and poverty are things of the past—anyone can go to the bank and borrow any sum interest-free, covering the loan by ingesting a specific drug that instils in them a sense of work-ethic and pride in settling one’s debts. For fifty or sixty pages the novel describes the high-tech world of the future and its many conveniences and peculiarities. There are robots everywhere, catering to all manner of human needs and desires, although some of these robots have malfunctioned or otherwise rebelled against human control. Indeed, we discover that these non serviam robots represent a large and dangerous group. 

Trichy grows increasingly dissatisfied, especially when he hears that among the many hallucinogens is a class called ‘mascons’ which mask or occlude whole aspects of reality. It’s at this point that the reader starts to notice certain similarities between the novel and a famous science fiction movie released some three decades later. The process by which Tichy ‘wakes up’ from what is, we learn, an almost entirely simulated reality begins when he is offered the choice of two pills by his girlfriend:

Tichy discovers the high-tech modern life is just an illusion. The reality is a grim, low-tech, utility environment.

In reality, people eat a revolting-looking gloop, although Tichy is assured by others who have escaped the illusion that this food contains all the nutrients the human body needs.

The remainder of the novel traces Tichy's fight-back against this simulacrum-world, although Lem takes his story in a more Dickian direction than the rather linear logic of the Wachowskis' movie. This grim utilty-level reality turns out to be yet another hallucination, behind which is another ‘reality’, behind which is yet another. In the last few pages Tichy encounters George P. Symington at the top of his skyscraper and the baseline reality is revealed: there are no robots, only people drugged into believing they are robots. The world is slowly freezing, an unstoppable slow apocalypse, and the layered realities of the various hallucinagens are used to obscure this terrible truth from humankind and prevent mass panic. Outraged, Tichy grabs Symington and jumps out the office window, dragging him down in a precipitous fall. But instead of dying, Tichy only splashes, solus, into the grubby water of the original sewer, which means that everything he has experienced was false and he is back in the ‘real’ reality of the Futurological Congress, or else that this is yet another layer of unreality, as perhaps was the original setting. I prefer this second reading.

So, yes: turns out the Wachowskis' film is Matrix: Recyclings. But you knew that already. [Laurence Fishburn voice: ‘no one can be told what The Plagiatrix is. You have to see it for yourself.’]